Collaborative review processes are enhanced by the presence of communication networks to bring a wide variety of participants together to accomplish common goals. For example, many documents generated in today's electronic society are created by an individual, but subject to review by several others. These documents to be reviewed are thus commonly created as a form of electronic content that is forwarded to others for review and revision, perhaps using an electronic network.
Reviewers participating in this shared review process typically make markups and comments, and sometimes changes, to an individualized version of the document, with each version having its own comments, markups, and other annotations. A set of modified documents may then be sent back to the document creator. The document creator then has the task of sorting through each of possibly many document copies and consolidating the comments (and changes) into a single edited copy. Some comments and changes may be the same across the versions, but the creator of the document still needs to sort through all of the information to make such a determination.
Some reviewers come to the review process late, so they are not aware of how the document has evolved, particularly with respect to comments made by other reviewers. Even if they have a desire to do so, they are often unable to see which form of a particular comment was in place at a particular time, because no such history is retained. Thus, late reviewers may end up duplicating comments and changes that have already been processed by other participants.